It boggles the mind that a human being is that resilient that despite the unspeakable agonies experienced at the hands of an unrepentant psychopath who held her prisoner to his violent sexual urges forced upon her and two other young woman for a decade she is still able to find it in her heart to 'understand' his own personal torment and general dissatisfaction with life. Having read which one is more than aware that many, if not most people, experience misery and dissatisfaction in life, yet how many seek to ameliorate their unhappiness by randomly selecting victims to commit atrocities upon?

Amanda Berry, abducted as a teenager by Ariel Castro in 2006 has co-written a memoir of her agonized years of torture when she was perpetually shackled to a register in the house owned by her tormentor, in which she sympathizes in part with his life's misfortunes: "There's not a lot of good in his life. It's his own fault, but sometimes I think he's as stuck in this house as we are. He and his ex split years ago, he hates his job, and he's going to prison forever if the police find out what he's done to us."

This despicable excuse for a human being who had taken the lives of three young women and held them hostage to his warped entitlement to torture and abuse them is seen by her as someone, despite his faults, that is pitiable. I sincerely doubt whether I would be so forgiving. She was chained throughout her ordeal, including the times she was being raped, and she remained chained throughout the pregnancy that fate forced upon her.

When she was ready to deliver her baby, its abhorrent father had her clamber into a child's swimming pool that he had placed on her bed, to minimize any ensuring 'mess' that might occur. He handed her a pair of child's paper-scissors to cut the umbilical. And this sorry misery of a human being's eyes lit with what the child's mother describes as joy and love when he saw the emerging baby.

Now that their vicious slave-master is dead by suicide knowing he would never emerge from prison alive, the three women are free to resume their lives. Their experience was incomprehensibly sub-human; how they are able to take up their lives now that they're no longer sex slaves is difficult to comprehend; the enormity of the misery and pain they had suffered more than a burden that most people could put behind them.

And, of course, there's the welfare of the child born to Amanda Berry, well loved by all, nurtured by that love, but in time requiring to be informed of her biological parent who forcibly held her mother as a sex slave, resulting in the child's birth through repeatedly violent rape. "Someday I'm going to have a lot to explain to her", wrote the little girl's mother. And that's quite the understatement.